- From: David Woolley <david@djwhome.demon.co.uk>
- Date: Thu, 21 Feb 2002 07:26:15 +0000 (GMT)
- To: w3c-wai-ig@w3.org
> can be "directed" by HTML (or something else) to read specific cells in a > layout table in a particular order, rather than linearly. (I think I know > the answer to this, i.e. "no," but I'd like to make sure I'm not overlooking > something.) I'm more or less certain the answer is no. However, in theory visual user agents can be instructed to draw them in a different order, so one linearises the HTML and shuffles in the CSS. Unfortunately there is patchy and broken support for this! The other thing one can do is to use rowspan and nested tables creatively (subject to any use of tables being a short term measure to get round the flakey CSS positioning support). E.g., for rowspan, you have a thin first row, with the second column spanned and containing the body text, but the top left cell empty and put the left side bar in the first, non-spanned, column in the second row. Incidentally, it seems (not surprisingly) that Visual Studio .NET make extensive use of CSS absolute positioning and does so in pixels, with the result that the average programmer, who has no accessibility brief, produces almost random linear reading orders and pages that won't tolerate font size, or even face, changes (or even I suspect high resolution displays with graphics software that maintains true point sizes). It fails to detect Web-TV as CSS incapable and produces something like abstract art on it! > On a potentially related note, what do people think about providing > *several* 'skip navigation' links on a page, e.g. one for 'main content,' Just to add to what has already been said, most of the W3C pages and documents already have tables of content. The problem tends to be that designers don't think they are designing an essentially linear document, so see tables of contents as just wasting screen real estate.
Received on Thursday, 21 February 2002 02:53:55 UTC